My Bizarre Libyan Holiday

My Bizarre Libyan Holiday

Most are rightly taken aback at the thought. But I was also intrigued when an educational cruise line invited me to lecture this past April on the classical antiquities of Libya—or, more properly, “The Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya the Great,” which since 1986 has been Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s name for his ancestral country.

As petroleum engineers will point out endlessly in the lobby of the Corinthian, Tripoli’s only Western hotel, Libya is both huge and tiny. Slightly larger than Alaska, it is likewise relatively empty of people and almost unexplored. Oilmen like both. We forget that, for all its notoriety, Libya, given the dearth of water and the nearness of the desert to within 50 miles of the coastline, has fewer than 6 million residents—one of the smallest populations of any Arab nation.

The Roman ruins at Leptis Magna and Sabratha are among the most impressive in the Mediterranean. And they are relatively untouched and unseen, since Qaddafi expelled most Europeans soon after his 1969 socialist revolution. An earlier bloody North African officer who staged a coup, Septimus Severus, was born in AD 146 at Leptis. His largesse to his native city—an enormous basilica, triumphal arches, a vast harbor and lighthouse—together with the booming commerce of the imperial eastern Mediterranean during Rome’s first attempt at globalization, made these North African coastal settlements among the most vast and opulent
of the empire. The dry climate and sparse nomadic population have for centuries ensured the preservation of Libya’s “cities in the sand” long after the Vandals looted them. They remain haunting today in their grandeur, more like recent ghost towns than ancient ruins.

It’s also impossible not to have a perverse curiosity about the proverbially lunatic present-day Libya. It is not just its 35-year history of sponsoring African revolutionaries, terrorist operatives in Europe, and hit squads sent after Libyan dissidents. There are stranger, North Korea–like tales. Many there still remember the Colonel’s 1977 fiat that all Libyans, even Tripoli’s 1 million urban residents, were to raise chickens; or his call to gather up all of Jamahiriya’s Western musical instruments and burn them en masse; or his offer of $5,000 to any Libyan who would marry a sub-Saharan black African to further Qaddafi’s own reputation as the great African unifier.

But even more bizarre were the reports that after 2003, Qaddafi had quite abruptly liberalized his police state. By the time of my visit in spring 2006, he was finishing his byzantine negotiations with the American State Department, which would get rid of his weapons of mass destruction, reopen embassies in both capitals, and allow Libyans and Americans to visit each country freely. Qaddafi had even appointed an American-educated economist as his new prime minister, and he was eager for the planned renewed relations with the United States to evolve into real friendship—hence the limited number of visas now accorded to the new generation of American visitors.

I had a few reservations, of course, about visiting Qaddafi’s Libya, having criticized Arab autocracies frequently in print, both here and abroad, and having read long ago the Colonel’s bizarre Green Book and its plans of making Libyans into new “partners” of his authoritarian socialist state, rather than “slaves” to Western-style capitalist democracy. That pamphlet—a mishmash of Nasserite, socialist, Islamic, Bedouin, and authoritarian pop philosophizing—was Libya’s Robert’s Rules of Order for a large cadre of aging revolutionary committees and increasingly worried security services.

Nor is it quite as easy to enter and travel inside Libya as its new generation of reformers envisions. Moreover, there was only an American interest section at the Corinthian hotel, no embassy, so travelers until recently were more or less on their own. And I had my own complications: because of a long-planned speaking tour in the American South, I would have to fly late and alone into Tripoli to meet the cruise ship from Italy—hopefully still docked at Leptis—and then trust that the visa that allowed me to enter only by air would also permit departure by sea to Carthage in Tunisia. Then there was a minor health problem of intermittent abdominal aching and nausea that had persisted for over a year, despite a physician’s diagnosis of “bad food” or perhaps yet another kidney stone. Still, I figured I would stop the morning sit-ups and the Libyan holiday would be fine.

After receiving my visa from a Canadian
go-between—by spring of this year, our government still had not allowed any Libyan consular officials inside the United States—I landed in Tripoli in mid-April, met my government-supplied travel minders, and began asking rapid-fire questions about Libya, ancient and modern. Muammar Qaddafi’s portrait, splashed over a background of his trademark green, still looms everywhere, albeit now surrounded
with Coke and Sony billboards. The Colonel
is also often superimposed on a verdant map of Africa to remind Libyans that his geriatric
revolutionary socialist movement still exudes Pan-African zeal.

When I arrived, Lionel Richie had just finished a rock concert at Qaddafi’s former
residence, commemorating the 20th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s “crime” of bombing Tripoli. Between songs, Richie offered prayers for Qaddafi’s deceased “daughter,” killed by the American bombs (most think that Qaddafi adopted her posthumously). Most Libyans I talked with, though, seemed indifferent to the celebration, griping instead about all the money going “south” to Third World con artists in sub-Saharan
Africa still masquerading as sixties-style Communists and national liberationists. They were much more interested in the world to the
north, asking whether George Bush would reply
seriously to Qaddafi’s bold peace feelers and follow the Europeans back into Libya.

As my minders drove me the next few days back and forth through the drab city, I was struck that a nation that could export 1.6 million barrels of oil a day (bringing in over $40 billion in annual income at recent prices) could not yet asphalt all the dusty back ways of Tripoli’s suburbs or fix the gargantuan potholes on the main thoroughfares. But read the Green Book, and then the general poverty of the country seems the logical manifestation of Qaddafi’s zealous vows to eliminate most private property, end a market economy and its “parasitical” middle class, shrink the professional elite, and ensure cradle-to-grave subsidies for everyone else—all the while supporting “liberation” movements from South Africa to Northern Ireland.

The first few days went well. The intrigue of Leptis Magna is not just that it spreads almost endlessly through dunes and grass-covered hills, with the pristine Mediterranean shore at its back, but that most of its remains, like Colonel Qaddafi’s oil, still lie under the sand. Skeletons of old Italian cart rails and rusted tools are scattered around the site, the detritus of Mussolini’s once-grand schemes to showcase his Roman forebears’ first civilizing mission
to tame North Africa. Western archaeologists, nursed on the dated excavation reports of the 1960s, have pined to return for four decades. For the
classical scholar, Leptis of the magnificent mosaics is like a mine in the mother lode, shut down when
its richest vein was scarcely tapped.

Libyans seem to talk nonstop. It’s as if they have been jolted from a long sleep and are belatedly discovering, thanks to their newfound Internet, satellite television, and cell phones—many carry two to ensure that they are never
out of service from competing companies—that there is indeed a wide world outside of dreary Tripoli and beyond the monotonous harangues
of government socialists on the state-owned TV and radio stations.

They talked about their new gadgetry, and much else, with infectious optimism. As
one hopeful Libyan travel entrepreneur with friends in the government explained, there
might be some irony after all to Libya’s long, self-imposed insularity. Yes, he conceded, foreign investment declined. Oilmen left. Petroleum
production nose-dived from more than 3 million barrels to never more than 2 million. But there was a silver lining: Did all that not have the effect of saving Libya’s precious resource to await the return of the present sky-high prices? Yes, Libya had banked a sort of strategic oil
reserve that now was to be tapped at its most opportune moment. Yes, it was Libya’s grand strategy to deny Westerners its petroleum
treasure for years, until they finally came around to pay what it was really worth!

While my travel entrepreneur had offered that analysis in deference to, or in fear of, the Colonel, I was not sure that it did not make a certain sort of post facto sense. And at cafés and the government port offices—it turned out that, due to restrictions on my visa, I was not allowed to leave Libyan soil to board even the docked cruise ship and had to return to hotels in Tripoli each evening—Libyans gushed on that geologists may have just scratched the surface of their country’s known oil and gas reserves. The petroleum alone under the desert was already pegged at 40 billion barrels—with 60 percent of the country still uncharted. To add to their euphoria, I did some quick math. At a theoretical $70 a barrel, the likely climb back to more than 3 million barrels a day could mean an extra $35 billion a year in windfall Libyan petro-profits.

Libyans have surprisingly little anger over these four squandered decades. Instead, they kept voicing the same themes—including that the past opportune “conservation” soon would bring dividends to the magnificent ruins at Sabratha and Leptis as well. “Isn’t it true, Dr. Hanson,” they often queried, “that our antiquities are the best in the Mediterranean? Because few have seen them, they are mysterious and not so damaged from tourism—and now just waiting for you in the West to work with us to rediscover them. The sand at Leptis is like the sand of the desert: both have been keeping our ruins and oil safe until now.”

The tiny world of classics, of course, eagerly awaits the reopening of Leptis Magna. But more important, there are rumors of Italian and Maltese tourist pavilions and more Corinthian-like seaside hotels to come—the Mediterranean coastline outside of Tripoli is as beautiful as
it is pristine. Over lunches, the Libyan tourist officials traded guesses on the numbers of
European cruise ships that would soon queue up outside Libya’s soon-to-be-built tourist docks. They would unload myriads of shoppers laden with euros and eager for Berber
folk arts and crafts—culture’s counterpart to
the proposed enormous liquefied natural gas
plants that would supply Europe’s energy appetite across the Mediterranean.

But always framing these conversations were two more melancholy themes that led to sudden embarrassing silences—the United States’ new Middle East “democratization” policy and Libya’s recent history. Would the United States warm to Libya’s bold opening without impossible preconditions? Were not Libya’s oil, antiquities, and goodwill enough to make everyone forget the unfortunate shared past—the last sentiments always in more hushed tones, given the fear of ubiquitous government informers in and outside our small circle.

When I went over the old litany—the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, Libya’s vast weapons-of-mass-destruction program, the efforts to cause havoc in Chad, the trumped-up capital convictions of Bulgarian nurses falsely charged with deliberately injecting Libyan children with HIV, the recent plan to assassinate Saudi crown prince Abdullah after he traded slurs with Qaddafi at an Arab League summit in 2003, and on and on—Libyans looked away as if the rude stranger had ruined a long-planned reunion celebration.

At night, I stayed at either a shabby government-run hotel or the overbooked Corinthian—the oasis in Tripoli, home to American consular officials, oilmen, and deal makers of every stripe. It is a Star Wars bar of opulent sheikhs and savvy Texans, although its immaculate marble, first-rate service—the nation’s only ATM stands in the lobby—and excellent food are more reminiscent of something out of the Gulf or Las Vegas.

A constant topic among foreigners is the
mystery over Qaddafi’s opening of the country in 2004 and his pledge to give up his WMD arsenal. American liberal pundits ridicule the administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein’s capture, and especially the end of his sons Uday and Qusay, prompted the Colonel’s desire to avoid the same fate for his family—proof, as it were, of the success of the Bush Middle East policy. But perhaps it is true—at least that is what Qaddafi supposedly told Italian prime minister Berlusconi in a phone conversation: “I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid.”

Libyans, of course, prefer to put a diplomatic spin on the conversion without assigning causation: “You Americans,” they told me, “should call it a windfall: you went to the wrong palace to find your WMD by force but, by our goodwill, found it here nonetheless—and in peace.” I smiled and added that rumors abound in Tripoli of Americans pondering a multimillion-dollar incinerator to dispose of the deadly stockpiles.

But there were other reasons for change as well. At least three of Qaddafi’s eight children are European-educated and reportedly have persuaded their father to emulate what they have seen and enjoyed abroad. His father’s most trusted child, 33-year-old Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, heads a charity foundation and talks often about reform and the need for more Western expertise. In vague terms, he even hints that political liberalization will follow the strengthening of the economy.

There is also real Libyan disgust over the
billions squandered on revolutionary—mostly terrorist—movements the world over, especially the largesse given to the African insurrectionists. As one minor Libyan official put it to me, “They all cut deals with you in the West—the African National Congress, the IRA, Sandinistas, Liberians, and the Palestinians. Now you think these former killers are okay again, but not us—who had less blood on our hands. So why should we not deal, too?” I passed over the probable falsity of that claim and instead reminded him of rumors that al-Qaida-backed
terrorists see Qaddafi’s quasi-secular socialism as heresy and have been trying in earnest to assassinate him—groups with such typical bumper-sticker nomenclature as the Islamic Movement of Martyrs, Libyan Jihad Movement, and Islamic Movement for Change. Apparently the enemy of our enemies is to be our friend, after all.

As the conversation lengthened, Libyan nationalism was more freely voiced as an additional catalyst for change. Did I know that
much of Libya’s known oil reserves were in the east, near the poorly demarcated and disputed Egyptian border? Did Americans appreciate that rich Libya is a vast country with
few Arabs, while poor Egypt is a narrow ribbon of more than 70 million Arabs?
More concerns followed. There are a million Egyptian guest workers in Libya, many of them there illegally. In Egyptian circles, pan-Arabist talk of the old Nasserite notion of a United Arab Republic still abounds, a “reunification” perhaps of part of Libya’s eastern tribal zones with an Egypt without oil—the same sort of nonsense that Libya once proposed to Tunisia. In this context, my Libyan companions voiced a weird sort of nostalgia for the old American Wheelus air force base, vacated in 1970—now an eerie, grass-covered area on the coast east of Tripoli that was partly expropriated by the Soviet and then the Libyan air force, and then bombed in the 1986 U.S. raid.

Driving over potholes in a small, cramped Nissan full of cigarette smoke, I thought, must explain the increasing fevers and occasional vomiting I was continuing to experience. Was it car sickness or something I ate? Even when much of the abdominal pain suddenly went away, the brief respite gave way to even more sweats and fever. Or maybe the malaise was due to the newly allowed Al Jazeera beaming in all the cafés, blaring out the usual monotony of IED explosions from Iraq and finger-shaking lectures from Gaza and Lebanon. Finally, after another three-hour marathon session with port officials, I was allowed onto the ship and had my first dinner with the guests. Then I finished a formal lecture on the Roman economy and culture of the early empire in the lounge—and quite literally collapsed in a fever in my cabin.

A few hours after the lecture, I woke up, delirious, and called the ship’s doctor, a young Ukrainian. After a quick examination, she guessed a perforated appendix, perhaps already of some hours’ or even a day’s duration. She then explained the bad—and worse—options: the ship was embarking the next morning on a 30-hour cruise to Tunisia. If I did have a ruptured appendix, surgery would be impossible at sea. I could risk the voyage or, as she advised, try a Libyan hospital, although no Westerner to her knowledge—and she knew of Russians who had worked in Tripoli—had recently experienced surgery in
the state-run hospitals. Prior to departure, I
had done some research on Libya and remembered coming across an old Wall Street Journal piece that referred in passing to Libya’s hospitals as “dirty death traps.” And I remembered the stories of the Bulgarian nurses and their clinic’s contaminated needles, as well as an offhand
remark by one of my newfound Libyan friends that he had just returned from Tunis for “minor” surgery.

By midnight, the fever had climbed higher, and there was really little choice. The Libyan minders arrived, worried that I had food poisoning or some other bad experience that might sour our once-happy plans for national conciliation. After a brief consultation, they notified the proper port authorities. I was allowed off the boat, driven in a taxi to the nearest Red Crescent clinic, and rushed in. The on-call intern had good and bad news: the pain and swelling probably indicated a textbook case of a perforated
appendix, so the diagnosis was not a problem. But there were a few hitches. I had to be operated on immediately at the clinic—no time
for the hospital—and that would require a mandatory government blood test and finding a surgeon at 2 am.

The clinic was what one sees everywhere in the medical practice of the Third World. In
the chaos, there seem no formal demarcations between patients and hordes of relatives, janitors, and doctors at work, or waiting and operating rooms. So I still insisted
that the recurring pain was just another kidney stone—I have passed a half-dozen in the last 30 years and had one cut out—or at least a year-old problem relieved, as in
the past, by antibiotics. But on arrival, the bleary-eyed surgeon smiled at this pathetic denial and matter-of-factly announced his
verdict: immediate surgery—the sooner the better, to ensure that the spread of peritonitis remained “localized.”

A Pakistani nurse sterilized a few surgical instruments, and soon a young Syrian anesthesiologist arrived. They took me to a tiny sparse room with a table and a light. The doctor assured me that he would not only do a good job but would also “clean up” the mess, with as many bags of saline and as much suctioning
as necessary. He laughed at my final stab at alternative antibiotic treatment, and murmured something like, “You probably want to live tomorrow, so we’d better start right now.”

I tried to use the bathroom, but the toilet was backed up, without paper, and the floor watery. I had a few memories in delirium of leaving a final phone message for my family back in California that things were not going well in Tripoli. When the nurse readied my mask, she said in English, “Put your trust in Allah.” For some reason—I am not a church attendee—I whispered back, “I prefer the redemptive power of Jesus Christ.” The last images I remember were of an illuminated minaret out the window and Qaddafi in sunglasses glaring down from the wall—and a strange sense of well-being that complete strangers, with little resources at their disposal, were eager to save my life at 4 am in an Islamic clinic.

Libya poses a special damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t challenge for the Bush administration, especially in autumn 2006, after the Hamas election victory on the West Bank and the ongoing mayhem in Iraq, Afghanistan, and southern Lebanon, when neoconservative idealism is fading before the return of more hard-nosed realism in foreign policy. I heard the arguments of both sides in a later meeting with State Department and National Security Agency officials following my return.

Skeptics can’t really believe that Reagan’s “mad dog,” who once called on Arabs to “destroy” the United States and its Arab surrogates, could ever be sincere, much less relied upon. But more important, how can the United States cut a deal that serves to legitimize a dictator and his gulag, when Americans are dying in the Hindu Kush and the Sunni Triangle to foster and protect democracies?

And what about cutting the ground out from under Libyan exiles, idealists, and reformers—such as the outspoken Mohamed and Fathi El-Jahmi—long the targets of Qaddafi’s operatives? Isn’t this the Libya that tried at one time or
another to overthrow or undermine the governments of Egypt, Chad, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia? And aren’t journalists still locked up—or killed, as in the case of
Daif al-Ghazai? And aren’t the infamous zina laws, which lock up indefinitely women accused of supposed moral laxity, still in effect, proving that in the Middle East a secular police state can be just as repressive as an Islamist
patriarchy? I gathered also that the present goodwill of the Libyan people toward the United States rested in part on our constant opposition to Qaddafi—confirmation of sorts of Bernard Lewis’s dictum that when a Middle Eastern autocracy hates us, we are popular, and when not, we are hated.

In response, the counterargument went that Libya has oil and natural gas, not just for America but to be put on the global market to help bring supply and demand back into a reasonable equilibrium. So far, our principled distance from Libya has only facilitated Chinese, Russian, and now European entrance into the country, all of whom demand little of Libya in terms of democratization but take away a lot in business and oil. And who knows exactly the true nature of Libyan dissidents? Aren’t some of them radical Islamists, who want electoral victory merely to legitimize their anti-Western hatred? That possibility later hit home for me in an informal Washington, D.C., meeting, when one Libyan democratic “reformer” insisted in our conversation on using “Zionist entity” for Israel as he unleashed a repugnant torrent of anti-Semitic nonsense.

The arguments for normalization go on: Qaddafi is somewhere in his late sixties, no longer 20-something, with succession now up
in the air. Ridding the world of his weapons-of-mass-destruction stockpiles is alone worth
the risk of reconciliation. If his Westernized
offspring can liberalize the economy now, perhaps they might
in the future assume a Juan Carlos role,
satisfied to be ceremonial godheads in a parliamentary republic. None has blood on his hands. Besides, the United States does not have a superfluity of friends in the Middle East, and the more wildcards in our hand the better, especially when the Libyans and we are shared targets of Islamic terrorists. To paraphrase the arguments of Jeanne Kirkpatrick, sometimes isn’t it enough that a stable Middle East autocracy eradicates terrorism, since, unlike theocracies or Communist states, such secular dictatorships are much
more likely in the distant future to evolve into constitutional governments? So the conundrum continues.

In the early dawn I awoke, groggy from the anesthetic but euphoric, since I was somewhat surprised to be alive. I was immediately told that the Colonel “discourages” analgesics of any sort and that this abstinence was “good,” since I would heal quicker and avoid postoperative constipation. No matter—survival was good enough, especially if the antibiotics would kill off the peritonitis. Back in the United States, a Libyan later laughed that I was lucky that I had tested HIV-negative on the mandatory preoperative test, and left it at that. I gathered that quarantine, not lifesaving surgery, awaits those with a positive result. The final bill for surgery, drugs, and a few days at the clinic was $800, not surprising in a socialist paradise where surgeons make about the same state-mandated wages as those who mop the floors.

These days of recuperation were the most interesting of my Libyan holiday, despite the pain from the surgery and the receding infection. The first guests were career diplomats from the American interest section. They were savvy, both married to Arab nationals, and the epitome of the American foreign service’s best professionalism, insisting that food be served, that IV needles be fresh—and urging me to make plans to leave as soon as possible. Soon we talked of politics, and with characteristic sobriety they cautioned neither pessimism nor euphoria, but “exploration.” I liked them but did not envy their task in the next month of laying the foundations for an embassy ex nihilo.

Dr. Hafez al-Hafez, a Libyan-American exile and medical consultant for the American interest section, also visited regularly. He had only recently been reinvited into Libya as a neurosurgeon. Dr. Hafez immediately made sure that
the peritonitis was in remission and that the right antibiotics were being dripped in, and
then he held up my gangrenous appendix in a jar of alcohol. He smiled that I had had a close call but admonished that the healed-over abscesses and pustules hanging from what was left from the carcass proved that it was a chronic problem of some duration. Then, like all Libyans, he talked politics.

If there is a future for Libya, it will require moderate and educated elites, such as Dr. Hafez, whom the government is cautiously inviting back in and whom
it needs desperately to jump-start the economy and reestablish the beginnings of a stable, humane culture. The doctor, in carefully chosen words, echoed the now-familiar themes: that the past is past; that Libya is Libyan, not
pan-Arabist; reasonable rather than Islamic fundamentalist; and ready for sincere reengagement. He feels that he poses no danger to the Qaddafi regime, since their short-term aims
are now one and the same in reestablishing contact with the West, and since he is a Libyan nationalist and an American go-between, not a zealot of any sort.

I also corresponded with a few Libyan government officials and, once back home, a few other exiles, and their similar optimism rests on the somewhat shaky proposition that if Libya’s vast petroleum and tourist potential is tapped, the resulting bounty will take on a life of its own, convincing even the revolutionary generation of 1969 that the Gulf model is preferable to the nightmare of Iran or Syria. Always in the background looms the untenable option of al-Qaida or the Muslim Brotherhood, which all want to avoid.

Libya was a key part of the world’s first
globalization, when Rome spread its culture to the shores of North Africa. By its own volition, it appears ready to reenter at least the global commercial system and renounce its past roguery. No one knows quite why Qaddafi changed or whether the about-face is sincere, much less whether
it bodes well for the United States in the long term—or even if we can embrace it in the short term without cynical hypocrisy on our part.

I’m sure a desire for a Western standard of living, fear of ending up like the Taliban or the Husseins, jealousy of the rich oil-exporting Gulf sheikhdoms, worry over Islamists and
former enemies in the Maghrib, weariness with foreign, money-hungry 1960s revolutionaries, the isolation of a crippling trade boycott, and the opportunity for more Machiavellian triangulation on a new world stage all played a role. But for now, the benefits for both sides outweigh the risks. So we should press ahead—with eyes wide open, in constant consultation with Libyan reformers, and always with the non-negotiable demand that the lives of Libyan dissidents, at home and abroad, are to be sacrosanct.

I lost my bottled, deflated, and black appendix on return, when my physician thought its
odd appearance suggested—if it really was an appendix and not part of the intestine, he wondered out loud—that it might well be cancerous. It was not, but the pathologist ground it up all the same. As I write this, four months after the surgery, I have just left the emergency room from another bout with abdominal adhesions, but remain very thankful to my friends in Tripoli, who saved my life and shed a great deal of light on a once-shadowy place, on a very memorable Libyan holiday.